The Kolog

What do you know about unions?

In the end, as Howard Zinn teaches us, it’s all about labor organizations:

In Philadelphia, working-class families lived fifty-five to a tenement, usually one room per family, with no garbage removal, no toilets, no fresh air or water.  There was fresh water newly pumped from the Schuylkill River, but it was going to the homes of the rihc.

In New York you could see the poor lying in the streets with the garbage.  There were no sewers in the slums, and filthy water drained into yards and alleys, into the cellars where the poorest of the poor lived, bringing with it a typhoid epidemic in 1837, typhus in 1842.  In the cholera epidemic of 1832, the rich fled the city; the poor stayed and died.

These poor could not be counted on as political allies of the government.  But they were there–like slaves, or Indians–invisible ordinarily, a menace if they rose (218).

If nothing else, labor movements of yesteryear as well as today depend on literary movements:

Mark Twain was neither an anarchist nor a radical.  By 1900, at sixty-five, he was a world-acclaimed writer of funny-serious-American-to-the-bone stories.  He watched the United States and other Western countries go about the world and wrote in the New York Herald as the century began: “I bring you the stately matron Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies.”

There were writers of the early twentieth century who spoke for socialism or criticized the capitalist system harshly–not obscure pamphleteers, but among the most famous of American literary figures, whose books were read by millions: Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris.

Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, published in 1906, brought the conditions in the meatpacking plants of Chicago to the shocked attentions of the whole country, and stimulated demand for laws regulating the meat industry.  But also, through the story of an immigrant laborer, Jurgis Rudkus, it spoke of socialism, of how beautiful life might be if people cooperatively owned and worked and shared the riches of the earth” (A People’s History of the United States of America, 321-322).

Now, I don’t live in the best part of town, I know that, but I don’t live in the worst either.  Or so I thought.

Having said that: I’m amazed by the number of “no trespassing” signs I see on the doors and windows of my neighbors.  Seriously, each day I go out to walk my dog, I see another sign hung in a window or doorway.

Even if it’s a rough neighborhood, what good will a sign do?  As Tesla impressed upon me at an early age, thanks to MTV: “Signs, signs, everywhere there’s signs / Fuckin’ up the scenery, breakin’ my mind / Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?” Of course, whether it’s sung by Tesla or the artists who originally wrote the ditty, the ultimate message of the tune is that signs matter little.

Seriously, those who would abide by any “no trespassing” sign are unlikely to trespass upon another person’s territory; and those who would trespass will not be intimidated by such warnings.

Perhaps it’s a passive aggressive form of bullying?  I don’t know, but whatever the reason, I find it futile and a waste of, yeah I said it, signs.

I am a bit confused.

I want to think of myself as a writer.  For decades, I have written songs and poetry, and for years, I have written essays and other forms of nonfiction; yet, I have managed to receive not even a penny for my thoughts.  Of course, my impecunious situation is due, among other things, to a general lack of ambition.  After all, I have sent only one piece of writing out for publication.  Still I find myself wanting to define myself as a writer.  More precisely, I want others to think of me as such.

In the end, is monetary reward what in fact defines a man of letters?  Too often, I think that to be the case.  But perhaps its the journey, i.e. the effort or the unending discipline, which the craft demands.

To be honest, I’m not even sure why I desire to be considered a writer.  Most likely, its an aspect of my personality.  So often, I have strove to represent myself in words (simply ask any wife, girlfriend or significant other).  Moreover, I have yearned for recognition always, which I believe to be the underlying motivation of any writer.

Having said that, maybe its a strange identification I have with writers who have been (re)presented to me in a variety of fashions.  Over the past several days, for example, I have been screening the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (1991) prior to falling asleep at night.  Admittedly, the frustrations that plague John Turturro’s character resonate with me.  Beyond that, the ambition of Jack Huston’s character in The Garden of Eden (2008)–or that of Gregory Peck’s character in the cinematic adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)–resonates with me in a profound manner.  Quite simply, I’m envious of those authors’ ability to work at their craft despite any momentary sense of its futility.  It inspires as much as it intimidates me.

Now, I need not tell anyone who struggles to represent themselves in words about the difficulties of working as a writer.  Any freshman composition student knows that there are countless forces conspiring against the aspiring writer.  Be it a general sense of inadequacy or a debilitating sense of boredom, the obstacles standing in the way of composing what is at the forefront, let alone the recesses, of the mind are seemingly insurmountable, which I imagine, is why personal perseverance seems to separate those of us whom we label writers from those who resign themselves to less fulfilling endeavors.